6 ms·

> it's really really hard to accurately ascribe meaningful credit (or guilt) for any change It's a bitter pill to swallow that I not only have to give these p

> it's really really hard to accurately ascribe meaningful credit (or guilt) for any change It's a bitter pill to swallow that I not only have to give these people my money to do this work, but they're wasting time trying to ascribe credit or blame for it. > and especially to do so in a way that is understandable by voters. This is the old "voters are actually stupid" idea. I don't buy it. Voters seem to have no problem deciding for themselves who deserves what credit, what politicians want is to market their "success" and to pass off their "failure." Again.. using our own funds to do it. I find the whole thing inappropriate. If we decide to credit you, you will be re-elected, if we decide to blame you, we will invoke the courts.. and I doubt they will have a "really really hard time ascribing guilt" to the appropriate party.

hackyhacky 4y ago
> It's a bitter pill to swallow that I not only have to give these people my money to do this work, but they're wasting time trying to ascribe credit or blame for it. I agree, it is a bitter pill. The alternative is to live in a society where leaders don't need the goodwill of the people in order to rule, and therefore have no interest in proclaiming their accomplishments. Fortunately, there are lots of dictatorships for you to choose from. > Voters seem to have no problem deciding for themselves who deserves what credit, Voters certainly decide, but I see little evidence that they decide accurately. It's not that they're stupid, it's just that (a) they don't understand how the government or the economy work and (b) have no collective memory. So, they decide, if there is inflation under the Biden administration, it must be Biden's fault, QED.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
yamtaddle 4y ago
> This is the old "voters are actually stupid" idea. I don't buy it. Voters seem to have no problem deciding for themselves who deserves what credit, what politicians want is to market their "success" and to pass off their "failure." It's been studied and is kinda true. You can pretty reliably do something like, over a controversial tax hike that affected 2% of the population, get 30% of respondents to claim it made their taxes go up, if there was a heavy media push about how it'd make everyone's taxes go up, and that's for something they should have direct experience with. You can also do things like get an amusingly-high percentage of people who oppose various social programs by name to tell you they'd support a law to replace them with some other program you describe... that's identical to what the program already does. Then there's all the people who tell you how much more dangerous America is now than when they were growing up in the 1960s or 70s. I dunno about dumb, but voters' views are rather less connected to reality than one might hope, and seem to have a whole lot more to do with what they're being told by pundits.
- mjevans 4y ago
  Emotions, rather than logic. Irrespective of party, for a sadly large portion of voters. Not everyone in every party, maybe more in some parties than others (I don't have any data for that, this is just a theory / supposition); but even for whatever party you the reader is most aligned with, there will be some who blindly follow that party and do not think for themselves.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    While I agree with you, I think it is easy to think of ourselves as “we are not the ones that are emotional, we think logically”. But the thing is, human beings are just emotional to the core and every sensory input is sensed as per the actual emotional state we are in, biased towards our inherent biases. Party alignment has unfortunately devolved into this “us vs them” pack mentality, and at this point I honestly question the point of parties at all. Why don’t we instead vote on individuals only, and make parties straight up illegal?
    - nixnax 4y ago
    - 20after4 4y ago
      That would be great but I don't see how we get there. The parties are in control, they choose who we are allowed to vote for.
    - brnaftr361 4y ago
      Ostensibly the parties are choosing select people through a strict vetting process. I think informing yourself about individuals would be much more difficult than picking a party with a long, presumably representative history. There's also a considerable barrier to entry. Louis Rossmann had Larry Sharpe on, who had an interesting talking points in the first three minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhqTxlxOQBM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhqTxlxOQBM I think the key point is that the media wouldn't cover him if he didn't buy ads, and the cost of a poll stood at $40,000. How far can you campaign on a shoestring budget? It's a little easier when you can pool resources through an institution or a party while also gaining the immense benefit of a much more robust network of connections. Those are some of the infrastructural barriers we've got to overcome, and I can't imagine that movement in that direction would go uncontested. It's quite the uphill battle.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lisper 4y ago
> Voters seem to have no problem deciding for themselves who deserves what credit That is certainly true, but they have a lot of trouble making these kinds of decisions correctly. Much of the time there is an objective fact of the matter regarding the causality between policy and outcome, but discerning it is very hard. In particular, for economic policy the time lag between cause and effect is commonly measured in months or years, and that can be very hard to unwind.
noasaservice 4y ago
I take it you've never seen the 'joke' political surveys that ask the following: "Do you want to repeal suffrage?" And naturally, most have no clue that has to do with women's voting rights, and asking to repeal them. Voters are very stupid. And when a group gets smarter, gerrymandering comes in to 'lower the average'.
- skissane 4y ago
  > "Do you want to repeal suffrage?" > And naturally, most have no clue that has to do with women's voting rights, and asking to repeal them. “Women’s suffrage” is the right of women to vote. “Suffrage” itself is simply who gets the right to vote. “Repeal women’s suffrage” has a very clear meaning, “repeal suffrage” is vague and unclear what is being repealed. Women’s suffrage? Universal male suffrage? (Once upon a time, most men couldn’t vote, since they didn’t meet the property qualifications.) Abolish elections altogether? (Use sortition? Introduce a dictatorship?) People aren’t stupid to be confused by a confusing question.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    > “Suffrage” itself is simply who gets the right to vote. No, suffrage is the right to vote. Not who. So 'repeal suffrage' simply means repealing the right to vote. It is not confusing, just absurd.
    - skissane 4y ago
      Is abolishing elections and replacing them by sortition (legislative juries) “absurd”? A very radical proposal, but doesn’t seem inherently “absurd” to me. And of course, under such a system, nobody has suffrage (unless one means the suffrage of jurors on a jury.)
      - tomrod 4y ago
        To be fair, most people have a hard time understanding the word "hypothetical" or realizing something different from the status quo.
Aunche 4y ago
> This is the old "voters are actually stupid" idea. I don't think that voters are necessarily stupid. They just happen to act stupidly because they treat politics as entertainment rather than their civic duty. If people dedicated their time trying to learn about policy instead of browse memes and articles that affirm their beliefs, we'd be much better off.
- kaba0 4y ago
  Well, unfortunately I do think that voters are stupid. For every smart people you know there is someone on the other side of the IQ distribution and you are just quite likely to be surrounded with a smarter bunch, biasing you towards thinking that the “average” is better than it actually is. Not the US, but I have read several reports of “vote counters” in Hungary and the amount of people that had to ask which of the options is (surprise) the right-wind, populist Orban is astonishing. And while illiteracy for example may well be worth in Hungary, the general idea is true of every country.
  - Aunche 4y ago
    Sure, the average person could be smarter, but there's nothing you can really do about that. The more concerning thing I'm noticing is that some of my peers who are highly rational when it comes to work but are completely irrational when it comes to politics (e.g. treat a heavily editorialized headline as an objective fact).
  - cyberge99 4y ago
    George Carlin summarized it best: “Think of your Average American. Now, realize that half of them are dumber than that guy!”
    - 20after4 4y ago
      I think that George Carlin produced a large volume of the most insightful political commentary in modern US history. I re-watch this one at least every couple of months: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrSAxtIYM08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrSAxtIYM08
Spooky23 4y ago
> This is the old "voters are actually stupid" idea The wisdom of crowds is fickle. Especially today where people have few social relationships and mass communications are so cheap.
Railander 4y ago
> This is the old "voters are actually stupid" idea. I don't buy it. "Stupid" is probably the wrong word here. "Gullible" is probably more apt, considering they keep falling for these.

hackyhacky 4y ago

> It's a bitter pill to swallow that I not only have to give these people my money to do this work, but they're wasting time trying to ascribe credit or blame for it. I agree, it is a bitter pill. The alternative is to live in a society where leaders don't need the goodwill of the people in order to rule, and therefore have no interest in proclaiming their accomplishments. Fortunately, there are lots of dictatorships for you to choose from. > Voters seem to have no problem deciding for themselves who deserves what credit, Voters certainly decide, but I see little evidence that they decide accurately. It's not that they're stupid, it's just that (a) they don't understand how the government or the economy work and (b) have no collective memory. So, they decide, if there is inflation under the Biden administration, it must be Biden's fault, QED.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

yamtaddle 4y ago

> This is the old "voters are actually stupid" idea. I don't buy it. Voters seem to have no problem deciding for themselves who deserves what credit, what politicians want is to market their "success" and to pass off their "failure." It's been studied and is kinda true. You can pretty reliably do something like, over a controversial tax hike that affected 2% of the population, get 30% of respondents to claim it made their taxes go up, if there was a heavy media push about how it'd make everyone's taxes go up, and that's for something they should have direct experience with. You can also do things like get an amusingly-high percentage of people who oppose various social programs by name to tell you they'd support a law to replace them with some other program you describe... that's identical to what the program already does. Then there's all the people who tell you how much more dangerous America is now than when they were growing up in the 1960s or 70s. I dunno about dumb, but voters' views are rather less connected to reality than one might hope, and seem to have a whole lot more to do with what they're being told by pundits.

mjevans 4y ago
Emotions, rather than logic. Irrespective of party, for a sadly large portion of voters. Not everyone in every party, maybe more in some parties than others (I don't have any data for that, this is just a theory / supposition); but even for whatever party you the reader is most aligned with, there will be some who blindly follow that party and do not think for themselves.
- kaba0 4y ago
  While I agree with you, I think it is easy to think of ourselves as “we are not the ones that are emotional, we think logically”. But the thing is, human beings are just emotional to the core and every sensory input is sensed as per the actual emotional state we are in, biased towards our inherent biases. Party alignment has unfortunately devolved into this “us vs them” pack mentality, and at this point I honestly question the point of parties at all. Why don’t we instead vote on individuals only, and make parties straight up illegal?
  - nixnax 4y ago
  - 20after4 4y ago
    That would be great but I don't see how we get there. The parties are in control, they choose who we are allowed to vote for.
  - brnaftr361 4y ago
    Ostensibly the parties are choosing select people through a strict vetting process. I think informing yourself about individuals would be much more difficult than picking a party with a long, presumably representative history. There's also a considerable barrier to entry. Louis Rossmann had Larry Sharpe on, who had an interesting talking points in the first three minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhqTxlxOQBM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhqTxlxOQBM I think the key point is that the media wouldn't cover him if he didn't buy ads, and the cost of a poll stood at $40,000. How far can you campaign on a shoestring budget? It's a little easier when you can pool resources through an institution or a party while also gaining the immense benefit of a much more robust network of connections. Those are some of the infrastructural barriers we've got to overcome, and I can't imagine that movement in that direction would go uncontested. It's quite the uphill battle.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

lisper 4y ago

> Voters seem to have no problem deciding for themselves who deserves what credit That is certainly true, but they have a lot of trouble making these kinds of decisions correctly. Much of the time there is an objective fact of the matter regarding the causality between policy and outcome, but discerning it is very hard. In particular, for economic policy the time lag between cause and effect is commonly measured in months or years, and that can be very hard to unwind.

noasaservice 4y ago

I take it you've never seen the 'joke' political surveys that ask the following: "Do you want to repeal suffrage?" And naturally, most have no clue that has to do with women's voting rights, and asking to repeal them. Voters are very stupid. And when a group gets smarter, gerrymandering comes in to 'lower the average'.

skissane 4y ago
> "Do you want to repeal suffrage?" > And naturally, most have no clue that has to do with women's voting rights, and asking to repeal them. “Women’s suffrage” is the right of women to vote. “Suffrage” itself is simply who gets the right to vote. “Repeal women’s suffrage” has a very clear meaning, “repeal suffrage” is vague and unclear what is being repealed. Women’s suffrage? Universal male suffrage? (Once upon a time, most men couldn’t vote, since they didn’t meet the property qualifications.) Abolish elections altogether? (Use sortition? Introduce a dictatorship?) People aren’t stupid to be confused by a confusing question.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  > “Suffrage” itself is simply who gets the right to vote. No, suffrage is the right to vote. Not who. So 'repeal suffrage' simply means repealing the right to vote. It is not confusing, just absurd.
  - skissane 4y ago
    Is abolishing elections and replacing them by sortition (legislative juries) “absurd”? A very radical proposal, but doesn’t seem inherently “absurd” to me. And of course, under such a system, nobody has suffrage (unless one means the suffrage of jurors on a jury.)
    - tomrod 4y ago
      To be fair, most people have a hard time understanding the word "hypothetical" or realizing something different from the status quo.

Aunche 4y ago

> This is the old "voters are actually stupid" idea. I don't think that voters are necessarily stupid. They just happen to act stupidly because they treat politics as entertainment rather than their civic duty. If people dedicated their time trying to learn about policy instead of browse memes and articles that affirm their beliefs, we'd be much better off.

kaba0 4y ago
Well, unfortunately I do think that voters are stupid. For every smart people you know there is someone on the other side of the IQ distribution and you are just quite likely to be surrounded with a smarter bunch, biasing you towards thinking that the “average” is better than it actually is. Not the US, but I have read several reports of “vote counters” in Hungary and the amount of people that had to ask which of the options is (surprise) the right-wind, populist Orban is astonishing. And while illiteracy for example may well be worth in Hungary, the general idea is true of every country.
- Aunche 4y ago
  Sure, the average person could be smarter, but there's nothing you can really do about that. The more concerning thing I'm noticing is that some of my peers who are highly rational when it comes to work but are completely irrational when it comes to politics (e.g. treat a heavily editorialized headline as an objective fact).
- cyberge99 4y ago
  George Carlin summarized it best: “Think of your Average American. Now, realize that half of them are dumber than that guy!”
  - 20after4 4y ago
    I think that George Carlin produced a large volume of the most insightful political commentary in modern US history. I re-watch this one at least every couple of months: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrSAxtIYM08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrSAxtIYM08

Spooky23 4y ago

> This is the old "voters are actually stupid" idea The wisdom of crowds is fickle. Especially today where people have few social relationships and mass communications are so cheap.

Railander 4y ago

> This is the old "voters are actually stupid" idea. I don't buy it. "Stupid" is probably the wrong word here. "Gullible" is probably more apt, considering they keep falling for these.